Sam Allardyce defends referees

Big Sam’s comments come after the FA overturned the red cards issued to Everton’s Darron Gibson and West Ham’s Carlton Cole by referee Andrew Taylor at Upton Park last weekend.

“This is a difficult period for referees. Why do they always seem to make more wrong decisions now,” said Allardyce.

“It’s probably because they are overworked and they are fatigued and the system has to be looked at.

“Referees are traveling all over the country and out in Europe and have been since the start of the season.”

Allardyce believes that a bigger group of referees should be ready to share the festive work-load to help ease fatigue, hoping that fresher referees will be able to hold their concentration to make the right decisions on the pitch.

“There’s not enough of them. They try their very best to get things consistently right. But it happens every year around this time of year,” he said.

“We had a couple [of bad calls] in our last game and there have been many throughout football over the Christmas period.

“Fatigue is everything in terms of decision making. Once it kicks in you lose the ability to make those decisions correctly.

“They need to ease the load on the referees we have. The game needs to move on and look at recruiting better refs from all avenues.”